January 1, 2012

Stock market gorilla fails for the first time in 11 years

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:16 pm

In 2000, gorilla Jacko picked a banana with a basket of shares attached to it, and those shares have since then outperformed the AEX (Amsterdam) index handsomely.

Z24 now reports that last year the gorilla’s random pick fared worse than the AEX for the first time. In 2011 AEX only dropped by 13%, whereas Jackos stocks decreased 45%.

Measured over 11 years the gorilla is still doing much better than the market. Jacko’s basket rose more than 30%, whereas AEX dropped by 55%.

See also: Dolphins outperform market analysts

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April 18, 2009

Gorilla-proof glasses

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 2:32 pm

Last year a gorilla called Bokito attacked a woman in the Rotterdam zoo, presumably because she had behaved herself aggressively by staring at the animal and grinning at it. Advertising agency DDB came up with a campaign for insurance company FBTO which resulted in the handing out of 2,000 of these Bokito-proof glasses that lets you look at a gorilla directly while seemingly looking away. Nice case of gorilla marketing (pun intended).

(Image source unknown, presumably one of the two companies mentioned above. Link: BoingBoing.)

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February 21, 2009

Monkey business

Filed under: Animals,General by Eric @ 5:10 pm

Gyasi, financial gururillaWhat do you do, when all the money you invested in stocks and options is losing weight faster than the contestants in the tv show de Afvallers XXL? Whom do you turn to, when your own financial advisor is only foreseeing doom and gloom and you’re desperatly looking for impartial and unbiased tips on where to put those 50 eurocents you still call your capital?

Enter Gyasi, a six year old gorilla, currently living with her family in Primate Park Apenheul in Apeldoorn. Over the next thirteen weeks, Gyasi will pick one share listed on the AEX from a stock of ten, each week. In order to raise Gyasi’s interest in the experiment and possibly also to ensure an impartial and unbiased selection, Gyasi will not pick the share directly, but she will be presented a row of numbered walnuts. Each number corresponds to a share on the AEX. The walnut that gets munched first, will be the winner for the week.

The real question, of course, is: will Gyasi outperform the dolphins from the Harderwijk Dolfinarium?

Link and photo: freesun.be

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May 8, 2008

Symbols in political cartoons: Trik and Gorilla

Filed under: Art,Comics by Branko Collin @ 8:00 am

Two Dutch artists who draw political cartoons using mainly words and symbols to make their point have been making a name for themselves recently: Trik and Gorilla. The former won the prestigious Inktspotprijs 2007, the award for the best political cartoon, with a drawing commenting on the stalemate the Belgian government formation suffered last year. Trik used the famous last panel of the hugely popular Flemish Suske and Wiske comic strip, a powerful symbol for Belgium among Dutch readers, in which Wiske breaks the fourth wall by winking at the reader over the words The End. In Trik’s version, Wiske was dead. The End?

Gorilla is a group of designers making cartoons for the front-page of daily De Volkskrant. Readers can can vote for their favourite cartoons and buy T-shirts of the cartoons they like at the newspaper’s website. Caption for this cartoon: “Dutch best prepared for climate change.”

The wordiness of the cartoons of both artists, and the use of puns makes the cartoons feel rather like the mysterious Loesje posters that started turning up on walls all over the country during the 1980s, and that contained such witty observations as “there’s always a little bit of month left at the end of my budget.”

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December 29, 2007

Dolphins outperform market analysts

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 4:15 pm

Dolphins perform better at the stock market than market analysts do, a recent experiment at the Harderwijk Dolfinarium suggests. The animals got to pick five balls that represented companies. Five stock analysts got to pick five companies that they thought would do well in the market. After a year, the dolphins’ stock had increased 27% in value, but that of all but one of the analysts had decreased in value. The one analyst that made a profit only made 10%.

In previous years similar experiments were done with a gorilla, with similar results. The gorilla got to pick from a number of labelled bananas that represented companies, and made a profit of 15% above market index. Obligatory joke: they had to switch to dolphins because the gorilla kept eating the bananas.

Link: Eamelje.net.

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May 24, 2007

Bokito the gorilla becomes a brand

Filed under: Animals,Gadgets by Orangemaster @ 9:28 am

Bokito is no longer that world-famous gorilla that broke out of its pen at the Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp) last week, it is also a brand name with CDs, printed materials, clothing and advertising, although the gorilla already had its own clothing line at bokitoshop.nl (which from what I can gather, is under construction). Some other advertising features Bokito plugging potatoes. The zoo is trying to stop this madness by forcing the potato folks to stop. And people at the pub are talking about how terrible it is for people to profit from other people’s misery. Ironically, the Dutch have a word for that, ‘leedvermaak’ (roughly, malicious pleasure).

(Link: zibb)

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May 20, 2007

Gorilla was teased by visitors

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 6:28 pm

So, what was that lesson many children learn about not teasing animals? No wait, not only did children apparently throw rocks at the gorilla, but the woman who was attacked and bitten had stared down the animal in a way you’re not supposed to, according to the zoo’s staff. She claimed that when she laughed, the gorilla seemed to laugh back, but in fact, this was a facial expression denoting “I’m gonna get you if you keep doing that”.

(Link: Dag)

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May 19, 2007

Gorilla runs amok in Dutch zoo

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 11:22 am
bokito.jpg

Yesterday afternoon, in the Rotterdam Zoo (Diergaarde Blijdorp), the almost adult gorilla male Bokito escaped from his pen (crib? pad?) and basically attacked a woman by biting her. Then, he popped over to the terrace of the Oewanja restaurant at the zoo and totally freaked people out. An employee of the restaurant was (is still?) in shock and the zoo is offering victim help. How this happened is as yet unknown. The fact that he could swim and cross the moat in his pen/crib/pad is a mystery to the keepers, as they say gorillas cannot swim. Maybe this is a real Dutch water gorilla.

Moral of the story: we cage up wild animals for our own pleasure and we don’t like it when they take off and attack people.

(Link: Diergaarde Blijdorp, via Netherlands Post)

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